Dave Noderer's Blog

Catching up after our sixth code camp here in the Ft Lauderdale, FL area. Website at: http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp.

For the 5th time, DeVry University hosted the event which makes everything else really easy!

Statistics from 2010 South Florida Code Camp:

• 848 registered (we use Microsoft Group Events)
• ~ 600 attended (516 took name badges)
• 64 speakers (including speaker idol)
• 72 sessions
• 12 parallel tracks
• Food
• 400 waters
• 600 sodas
• 900 cups of coffee (it was cold!)
• 200 pounds of ice
• 200 pizza's
• 10 large salad trays
• 900 mouse pads

Photos on facebook

Dave Noderer: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=190812&id=693530361

Joe Healy: http://www.facebook.com/devfish?ref=mf#!/album.php?aid=202787&id=720054950

Will Strohl:http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2045553&id=1046966128&ref=mf

Veronica Gonzalez: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=150954&id=672439484

Florida Speaker Idol

One of the sessions at code camp was the South Florida Regional speaker idol competition. After user group level competitions there are five competitors. I acted as MC and score keeper while Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell, John Dunagan and Shervin Shakibi were judges. This statewide competition is being run by Roy Lawsen in Lakeland and the winner, Jeff Truman from Naples will move on to the state finals to be held at the Orlando Code Camp on 3/27/2010: http://www.orlandocodecamp.com/. Each speaker has 10 minutes.

The participants were:

Alex Koval
Jeff Truman
Jared Nielsen
Chris Catto
Venkat Narayanasamy

They all did a great job and I’m working with each to make sure they don’t stop there and start speaking at meetings.

Thanks to everyone involved!

Volunteers

As always events like this don’t happen without a lot of help! The key people were:

Ed Hill, Bob O’Connell – DeVry

For the months leading up to the event, Ed collects all of the swag, books, etc and stores them. He holds meeting with various DeVry departments to coordinate the day, he works with the students in the days  before code camp to stuff bags, print signs, arrange tables and visit BJ’s for our supplies (I go and pay but have a small car!). And of course the day of the event he is there at 5:30 am!!

We took two SUV’s to BJ’s, i was really worried that the 36 cases of water were going to break his rear axle! He also helps with the students and works very hard before and after the event.

Rainer Haberman – Speakers and Volunteer of the Year

Rainer has helped over the past couple of years but this time he took full control of arranging the tracks. I did some preliminary work solicitation speakers but he took over all communications after that. We have tried various organizations around speakers, chair per track, central team but having someone paying attention to the details is definitely the way to go! This was the first year I did not have to jump in at the last minute and re-arrange everything. There were lots of kudo’s from the speakers too saying they felt it was more organized than they have experienced in the past from any code camp. Thanks Rainer!

Ray Alamonte – Book Swap

We saw the idea of a book swap from the Alabama Code Camp and thought we would give it a try. Ray jumped in and took control. The idea was to get people to bring their old technical books to swap or for others to buy. You got a ticket for each book you brought that you could then turn in to buy another book. If you did not have a ticket you could buy a book for $1. Net proceeds were $153 which I rounded up and donated to the Red Cross. There is plenty going on in Haiti and Chile! I don’t think we really got a count of how many books came in. I many cases the books barely hit the table before being picked up again. At the end we were left with a dozen books which we donated to the DeVry library. A great success we will definitely do again!

Jace Weiss / Ratchelen Hut – Coffee and Snacks

Wow, this was an eye opener. In past years a few of us would struggle to give some attention to coffee, snacks, etc. But it was always tenuous and always ended up running out of coffee. In the past we have tried buying Dunkin Donuts coffee, renting urns, borrowing urns, etc. This year I actually purchased 2 – 100 cup Westbend commercial brewers plus a couple of small urns (30 and 60 cup we used for decaf). We got them both started early (although i forgot to push the on button on one!) and primed it with 10 boxes of Joe from Dunkin. then Jace and Rachelen took over.. once a batch was brewed they would refill the boxes, keep the area clean and at one point were filling cups. We never ran out of coffee and served a few hundred more than last  year. We did look but next year I’ll get a large insulated (like gatorade) dispensing container. It all went very smoothly and having help focused on that one area was a big win. Thanks Jace and Rachelen!

Ken & Shirley Golding / Roberta Barbosa – Registration

Ken & Shirley showed up and took over registration. This year we printed small name tags for everyone registered which was great because it is much easier to remember someone’s name when they are labeled! In any case it went the smoothest it has ever gone. All three were actively pulling people through the registration, answering questions, directing them to bags and information very quickly. I did not see that there was too big a line at any time. Thanks!!

Scott Katarincic / Vishal Shukla – Website

For the 3rd?? year in a row, Scott was in charge of the website starting in August or September when I start on code camp. He handles all the requests, makes changes to the site and admin. I think two years ago he wrote all the backend administration and tunes it and the website a bit but things are pretty stable. The only thing I do is put up the sponsors. It is a big pressure off of me!! Thanks Scott! Vishal jumped into the web end this year and created a new Silverlight agenda page to replace the old ajax page. We will continue to enhance this but it is definitely a good step forward! Thanks!

Alex Funkhouser – T-shirts/Mouse pads/tables/sponsors

Alex helps in many areas. He helps me bring in sponsors and handles all the logistics for t-shirts, sponsor tables and this year the mouse pads. He is also a key person to help promote the event as well not to mention the after after party which I did not attend and don’t want to know much about!

Students

There were a number of student volunteers but don’t have all of their names. But thanks to them, they stuffed bags, patrolled pizza and helped with moving things around.

Sponsors

We had a bunch of great sponsors which allowed us to feed people and give a way a lot of great swag.

Our major sponsors of DeVry, Microsoft (both DPE and UGSS), Infragistics, Telerik, SQL Share (End to End, SQL Saturdays), and Interclick are very much appreciated.

The other sponsors Applied Innovations (also supply code camp hosting), Ultimate Software (a great local SW company), Linxter (reliable cloud messaging we are lucky to have here!), Mediascend (a media startup), SoftwareFX (another local SW company we are happy to have back participating in CC), CozyRoc (if you do SSIS, check them out), Arrow Design (local DNN and Silverlight experts),Boxes and Arrows (a local SW consulting company) and Robert Half.

One thing we did this year besides a t-shirt was a mouse pad. I like it because it will be around for a long time on many desks. After much investigation and years of using mouse pad’s I’ve determined that the 1/8” fabric top is the best and that is what we got!

So now I get a break for a few months before starting again!

Recently I had a need to create a SQL Server 2008 SSIS package that could do SFTP transfers. The FTP component that comes with SSIS is very useful but it cannot do secure transfers.

In the past I have had to use scripting to create dynamic script files for WS_FTP pro (which I do use and like very much!!) but this brought in many more moving parts and was subject to failure for a number of reasons.

After a bit of searching I found http://www.cozyroc.com and in particular the SFTP component: http://www.cozyroc.com/ssis/sftp-task.

Due to the fair amount of complexity in the file names on both sides I was driving it from a script task.

The programming is slightly different from the normal ftp task and actually a bit simpler. The normal examples for using the ftp task did not work with cozyroc and after a fair amount of experimentation and searching I finally submitted a question to cozyrock.

Ivan Peev (Mr CozyRoc himself) responded with a sample script: http://www.cozyroc.com/script/ftp-file-exists-task that quickly showed me how to accomplish what I wanted!

The component is happily transferring files securely in the automated process and I know I will be referring CozyRoc to customers when this need arises.

This is only one of the many components in the CozyRoc package. There are also control flow tasks for zip, ssh, amazon s3 and stream objects and data flow for oracle, informix, db2, edi and sales force to name a few.

I'm at the Windows 7 launch event in Ft. Lauderdale working the community booth with Alex Funkhouser, Kathy Malone and a brief celebrity appearance by Shervin Shakibi,

Here are some pictures I took this morning!

View Full Album

I just got done reading "Effective REST Services via .NET" by Kenn Scribner and Scott Seely. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-6125-7

I've been hearing a lot about restful services and have absorbed the basics by osmosis but always like to read a book to cement the ideas more clearly.

This book does a good job of that but goes a few steps further.

A few things I particularly liked were:

- Review of http and how the internet works, things I don't pay much attention to any more!

- While presenting "pure" restful services also pointing out practical applications that might divert a bit.

- This book has a very good tutorial on asynchronous programming.

- The examples are good if a bit complicated but do build on each other.

- Senarios and examples cross both windows and web development.

- All in C# but was easy enough to read it looks like C# only books are the future.

It was worth the read and I have a much better understanding of restful services.

We had a great time at Brus tonight. 25 people showed up for the event and I got to clean out my prize closet with a raffle.

A few people made good job connections and I personally got to meet a few new people and find out what they are doing!

Thanks to Kaplan for sponsoring the appetizers!

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Here is a link to a short interview I did with the Microsoft VB team.

Also interesting is all the great links and resources you can get to from the VB team’s blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/pages/i-m-a-vb-dave-noderer-vb-mvp.aspx

This past weekend (June 18-20) the first South Florida Kickstartz  program was held at DeVry University in Miramar, FL.

On Thursday night something like 20 ideas were presented and discussed with each on getting a paste up sheet on the wall with notes.

On  Friday, a few more ideas were presented and as a group we culled the ideas and combined a few down to four, three of which  were launched into groups for further work.

One of the ideas I had proposed, a home energy monitor was worked on my myself, Lee Culver, Joshua and Alex Mask.

We spent the first couple of hours investigating hardware and concluded that there was no AC control / plug that both controlled the device and also monitored the power.

The other technical area we investigated was control and monitoring software. There are some commercial standards out there like x10 and we ended up looking a bit deeper  into Zwave. Did not go too far down this but I did order the sdk.

Then we drew a simple system diagram  and posted  on a  web  page with the “company” name PowerLinCo.com.

So… we didn’t start a company but did take the idea a few steps further. Perhaps this will turn into a student senior project at Devry.

The other idea that might end up getting launched was my pet project, www.floridasolarpower.com. This was part of the fourth set of ideas that was still up on the wall but not being actively worked. Jace expressed his interest in the core idea of starting a community around renewable energy  much like we have done over the  past nine years with the .net software developer community.

So after some discussion we outlined some ideas and came up with a new name.. RenewableEnergyGuild. I’ve included some of the notes below.

• What is it
  • Develop a community around renewable energy
  • Consumer oriented
  • Monthly meetings?
  • Speakers / presentations / demonstrations
  • Field Trips

• Members - Who is it?
  • Will John Q public show up?
  • Tree huggers
    • Sierra club in Florida?
    • National Wildlife
    • Horticulture??
    • Organic
  • Homeowner associations / condo's
  • Demo green facility
    • Boys and Girls club?

• Sponsors / speakers
  • Vendors
  • Government agencies
    • SF Water management
  • Power companies
    • FPL
  • Home power magazines
  • Solar Today – ASES

 

As for the other groups, Kathy Malone made progress in the area of information pertaining to  hazardous chemicals and Jason Milgram and a large group worked out a number of details around a secure document transfer/tracking service.

Marc Asselin did a fantastic job of organizing this first Kickstartz event and we all learned a lot about various technologies and how to improve the next event.

Thanks to everyone who participated and sponsored the event!!

I’m luck to be surrounded by talented people including  Jonathon King,  former Sun Sentinel reporting, now fiction writer who lives near by and frequents Bru’s  room across the street for lunch. All of his books are based in South Florida so besides the always interesting stories, it’s fun to know the locations and in some cases even the people that are mentioned or referred to.

His latest is a bit of a diversion into a historical novel based mostly in Palm Beach / West Palm beach revolving around Henry Flagler’s railroad and resort in the 1890’s. He is also self-publishing this book with Middle River Press so he can have a lot more control over it’s release and sales.

A signed copy of the book is available for sale on his website at: http://www.jonathonking.com/styx.html. You can also find out a lot more about Jon and his books there.

Long past due is a review of Julie’s book, Programming Entity Framework, ISBN 978-0-596-52028-1

Julie adopted Entity Framework early on, from before it was even available to most MVP’s. This book is a reflection of that involvement with the product and the product teams over the past few years.

This 23 chapter, 750+ page book covers a lot of ground and provides a great reference book for almost everything entity framework related.

The first few chapters introduce the framework and will give you a good working knowledge of how to use it. A few other chapters like using the framework with stored procedures and the entity data source control are a good place to start.

What was amazing to me was the variety of ways that you can (in some cases have to) query the entities with Entity SQL LINQ and method based queries. I’m hoping this is more related to the early stage of the entity framework and eventually the options required to get at various features would focus on a single methodology.

The base of the entire framework is the entity model and is usable in theory with or without a sql server backing store. The “wizard” type of tools currently drive off of SQL Server which is fine with me because I have always started with the data model. The modeling language does allow you to go further and add both relations and entities which don’t / can’t exist in a purely relational model.

Once you leave the vanilla scenario of matching your entity to the database the workload goes way up and there is a lot of detail in the model and storage parts of the framework you will have to be familiar with and manipulate.

The good news is that this book goes through all of the above scenarios and has something about all of the related subject.

Another nice feature is that all the examples are in both vb and c#.

In this light I highly recommend this book for both an introduction to the Entity Framework and also as a reference book you will use over time as you need additional features.

For more information visit Julie’s website: http://www.thedatafarm.com/main.aspx

Marc Asselin has put together a short video about the Kickstartz entrepreneur weekend coming up June 18-20 2009.

Video:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ppl5kQQ8hE

Kickstartz website: tp://www.kickstartz.com/

When I’m home in Deerfield Beach, FL (26.317N, 80.078W) and there is a space shuttle launch watch it from the top of the 5 story garage across the street. Below is the view overall slightly enhanced and then the launch trail heavily enhanced so you can see it clearly. The view is facing north so you can see that the the space center is actually a bit west, ~ 80.6 W due to the slantof Florida to the east. The tall building below the right corner of the enhanced area is the Boca Resort. We live a few blocks south of Boca Raton and 10 miles north of Ft Lauderdale. The tall condos at the right side of the picture are in Boca and are on the ocean.

I was happy to find Small Basic from Microsoft that comes with a programming manual that is simple enough for anyone to follow.

Download and more information here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

As of today the program is in CTP but makes writing windows programs very easy. First “Hello World” program is very simple:

TextWindow.WriteLine("Hello World")

When you start the program a very nice and simple dev environment comes up. Here with a program from the book showing nested looping, turtle graphics (a feature not required) and an event handler.

This is fun to play with with intellisense and help on the right as illustrated below:

Starting to think how I can introduce a bunch of kids to programming with this!

It’s always nice to learn something new…

Today I learned that variables in SQL Server stored procedures have no scope rules.

Take this example:

--
Declare @Outer int
Set @Outer = 1

While 1 = 1
begin
    Declare @Inner int
    Set @Inner = 2
    break
end
Select @Outer, @Inner

As a developer I expected that a new “instance” of @Inner would be created on each iteration of the loop and that the ending select would actually get an error saying that there was no variable @Inner.

But this is not true, all variables have a scope of the batch in which they are declared, code blocks be damned!

Lesson learned… re-initialized each loop of the procedure and everything works as expected.

Embarrassing as I’ve been writing stored procedures for 15 years…

We had the first online version of the Ft Lauderdale developer group meeting tonight.

Eighteen people were online but i was the only one with a web camera… I hope more start getting the video cranked up!

The topic was Introduction to MVC and was suppose to be given by Jim Zimmerman out of Tampa but he called at 5:30 (for the 6:30 meeting) reporting that his laptop power brick was toast and he was out of juice. He had tried to get another one but at this point he was dead in the water because his presentation was on the laptop too….

So he gave David Hayden a call who agreed to do the presentation as they are planning to do some of this for the TampaDev.org group too. That group is focused exclusively on MVC, at least for now.

David did a great job of just going through the basics of an mvc app, no power points, just use visual studio and make a project. We dug into the T4 templates a bit and also validation. There were a number of questions that sparked additional discussion.

I used live meeting to record it all to.

A link to the recorded meeting can be found here: https://www311.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/view?cn=&id=PZ6Z2C&pw= no key is required.

More information, video’s, etc at: http://asp.net

Lots more info at the Tampa Bay Developers MVC group: http://tampadev.org

Visiting son Michael here in Rochester this weekend, he “scored” a couple of VIP Passes to the RIT Imagine Festival (http://www.rit.edu/imagine/) a free event that over 20000 will attend.

We got there early to see the start of the energy race. The idea was to see which vehicle could travel the 3 mile campus course using the least amount of energy. The winning entry used 27.5 watt hours of energy from solar charged batteries.

The entry below did not win but i thought it was an interesting vehicle.

There were two winners one took Dr Destler’s 1800’s banjo (I hope they give it back!) and the other got a $1000 prize.

This was of particular interest because I graduated RIT in 1975 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. The campus has expanded dramatically, perhaps by a factor of 4. Had to get this picture of me in front of the Gleason Engineering building.

The number of projects and innovative things the students are doing is mind boggling. Here are a few of the things i thought were interesting. The great part is that many of them combine multiple disciplines to build real things. This list is a very small set of things, the range of things on display was simply amazing!

• Women in engineering middle school educational sessions teaching kids about fuel cells and electronics
• Investigation into the ways that nanoparticles can enter the body through the lungs.
• Building real hybrid rockets and related telemetry and electronics
• A number of internet developments like http://www.newdigs.com and http://bookmaid.com
• Biomechanics simulating human hand operations. I did not ever see some of this close up before. To simulate a contracting muscle they use what look like fiber covered 1/2” or so balloon tubes. When they pressurize it with air it becomes fatter and contracts longitudinally. When you let the pressure out it relaxes and stretches out.
• The robotic hot dog assembler but that was packed and it was hard to even get a glimpse of it.
• The concrete canoe
• A visit with the off roaders club with a collection of killer jeeps.
• http:tagg.rit.edu is a way to track the most popular exhibits. By texting the exhibit number, votes are automatically tallied and displayed on screens around the festival. And you can go to the website, enter your phone number, and not only see what you have tagged (try my cell: 9542701186) but also see what other exhibits you might want to visit.

Here are a couple more pictures from the day:

Take a close look at the hat, yes we had propeller heads there!

Computer Science Lobby displays: